Portobello Live: Conversations with local authors “on, about and for Portobello”

Portobello Live! Is an exciting new festival showcasing the heart and art of vibrant West London in a rich blend of music, cabaret, spoken word and performance.Book and Kitchen is delighted to host a conversation with local authors On, About and For Portobello.

Held over May Day bank holiday, the two-day festival features hot new bands and performers alongside rock royalty and special guests. Music, film, poetry and art lovers will join with music industry and media professionals to enjoy the best of the West in a diverse programme of delight.

The conversation will be hosted by Ray Roughler-Jones, a key figure in the burgeoning music and art scene emerging from the boho pubs around Notting Hill. Ray launched The Roughler magazine from the Warwick pub in Portobello Road and rub Dylan’s bar in San Francisco.

Paolo Hewitt is a well-known music and style journalist who has written for several publications and an author of ten books, including biographies of the mod movement and Creation Records as well as a heartfelt autobiography ‘The Looked-After Kid’.

Chris Salewicz is an acclaimed music journalist and writer. He was at NME in the late 1970’s and early ’80’s and has written copiously for the Sunday Times, The Face and Q magazine. His books include the classic biography of Joe Strummer and the lavishly applauded biography of Jamaica titled ‘Rude Boy’.

Julian Mash has lived and worked in and around Portobello Road for the last ten years, half of which was spent working at the Travel Bookshop, a local institution and the inspiration for the bookshop in the film Notting Hill.

Neal Brown is the author of Meditations on Art Hate (L-13, 2010), Tracey Emin, Mat Collishaw, and Billy Childish: A Short Study. As well as writing for ArtReview, he has written about art for Flash Art, Frieze, Art Monthly, Modern Painters, Parkett, Art and Christianity, Tate Etc., and the Independent on Sunday. He curated To The Glory of God: New Religious Art at the second Liverpool Biennial.

Jennifer Nadel is a qualified barrister and award-winning journalist who reported from around the world for the BBC, Channel Four News and ITN. Her non-fiction book, Sara Thornton: The Story of a Woman Who Killed, was made into a BBC Film and a Channel 4 documentary. She now writes fiction.

Brian Nevill is an Anglo-German drummer, writer, and compilation compiler. Since the 80s he has worked with many artists including Shriekback, Pigbag, Kirsty MacColl, Pete Molinari, Luc Van Acker. Since ‘retiring’ from this, he has turned to his other first love, that of writing proper. Boom Baby is his first novel.

Lloyd Bradley is one of the UK’s leading experts on modern black music from Great Britain and Jamaica. He has written extensively on health & fitness and is an accomplished speaker, lecturer and broadcaster.

Tom Vague is a historian with the community group History Talk. He moved to Notting Hill in the 1980s, edited the Clash fanzine Vague, from which he takes his surname, and dedicated himself to recording the history of this most singular London area.